Casualness: it's not about what it looks like it's about what it does

Abstract

My research consists of site-specific projects that form relationships with locations through actions. e projects draw directly from the situations in which they are presented. I examine concepts such as being in the world, addressing the everyday, the role of the travelling artist, the artwork as object, and casualness, and feed off a combination of sources and methodologies. I may draw on disciplines such as interior design and architecture, but I apply them as only an artist would. ough very specific, I intend my art works to come across as open and casual gestures. rough my work I explore whether context and situation can be just as informative and useful as materiality or supposed content of the work itself. Underpinning my process is a performative ethos. I investigate the way material interventions made in response to a site’s particular temporal, physical and geographical conditions can be a means of de-programming everyday behavior and experience. Where it goes from there has more to do with the poetics of movement and human relationships than with any formal analysis of space. By following the example of art practices like Ceal Floyer’s and Gareth Moore’s I modify and subvert the orthodoxies of object-reliant practices and gallery-based works. My research furthers these ideas using every-day actions and materials in order to displace and challenge how contemporary art is exhibited, viewed, and archived. rough my work I seek to understand how to produce artwork that can be shown outside of and at the same time in conversation with a contemporary art context. I follow a similar approach in writing about my work in this document: I employ a casual and conversational way of talking about my practice as it develops over time. Often appropriating the materials and vernaculars of architecture, I create handmade, crudely constructed sculptural interventions that are simultaneously against and at one with a given environment. Drawing out both the physical and lyrical qualities of materials (usually mundane, practical materials such as concrete, textiles and ceramics), my work envisages an encounter, and foregrounds an action. It collapses and confuses the lines between process and product, doing and documentation.